Remember the 1980 movie The Shining? How Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and Danny (Danny Lloyd) barely survived their time at The Overlook Hotel in the tundra of a Rocky Mountain winter? How there, they ducked and dodged attacks by Jack (Jack Nicholson), her deranged husband? How he famously broke down the hotel door, deviously snarling: “Here’s Johnny?” How the mother and son would credit their survival to Dick (Scatman Crothers), the hotel chef, whose help ensured that, in the end, the writer-gone-crazy found himself lying in the cold hard ditch of the hotel maze?
I watched this nightmare that ends with mother and son driving off in the snowcat on a hotel TV in my room during the SEIU’s Women Lead 2024 conference in Charlotte, N.C. Like Wendy peering out the great big glass of the hotel lodge, I gazed at the howling winds of the monstrous Hurricane Helene from my window. Trapped inside a hotel with no possible exit, I began to think of how my situation was like Wendy’s. How our situation, as women, could be likened to Wendy’s: trapped in a country, where the raging storm of the extreme right forces us to confront the anger and aggressiveness of a violent movement that is hellbent on our destruction.
In the way I’m sure Stanley Kubrick and Stephen King intended, the spookiness of the movie started to creep its way off the television screen and steeped itself into my room. But I wasn’t scared of just Jack and his devilish smile. If anything, seeing Wendy’s fright only reminded me of the terror I see every day in the eyes of the women I love. The tears and cries for help of Wendy were simply a reflection of the emotions I had seen on full display at the Women Lead conference. And that’s when it hit me: Wendy was me.
All these reasons are why we root for Wendy, who – with each cry for help, each swing in self-defense, and each proclamation of dignity – fights for her own survival. Wendy’s harrowing fight painted the picture that the modern women’s movement finds itself in at this very moment. She fought against an unpredictable and dangerous Jack, just like we women find ourselves fighting against the fascist MAGA movement that shares these same exact traits as the deranged husband.
Throughout the film, Wendy’s personal journey provides insights into how we as women can organize in our collective fight. On the flip side, Jack’s violent actions provide a metaphor for what the MAGA movement hopes to accomplish. In the end, will a united front with strong women in leadership positions leave behind fascism in the dustbin of American history, just as Wendy left Jack frozen and alone in The Overlook Hotel maze? With a Trump presidency now a reality, these questions are more important than ever.
Working-class metaphor
Let’s go back to The Shining. Before the hotel shuts down for the winter season, Dick, the chef, and Danny, the son, share a moment of solidarity when the chef reveals to the child that he, too, has “the shining.” Just like Danny, Dick can sense others’ feelings and thoughts without having to speak to them directly. In the end, “the shining” is what brings Dick all the way from South Florida to the snowy peaks of Colorado.
In the way he dropped everything to travel across the country to aid Wendy and Danny, Dick is like the workers and activists around the world who flock to each other’s aid to help each other’s struggle. It’s why unions like SEIU and the UAW have called for a ceasefire and an arms embargo to halt the genocide in Gaza. It’s why thousands flock to the fight against oil corporations, whether it was against the Dakota Access Pipeline or Line 3 in Minnesota. The awareness that others are in danger is why we fight for the ones we love, even when we hate to do it. We refuse to find ourselves in a situation where there is no one left to fight for us.
Using the fictional horror plot of The Shining as metaphor should not detract from the fact that multi-racial and movement solidarity exists in a very real and concrete way off the silver screen. Angela Davis noted something similar in her remarks at the 2016 Women’s March in Washington, D.C., following the inauguration of Donald Trump.
To Davis, and millions of American women, the march and the broader feminist movement was not just a one-day, single-minded affair. For women and feminists around the world, feminism and the women’s movement “calls upon all of us to join the resistance to racism, to Islamophobia, to anti-Semitism, to misogyny, to capitalist exploitation.” The Women’s Movement and the fight for justice is not just about fighting for ourselves. The fact that Wendy saved Danny before Jack could reach him was the only reason both of them were even able to escape alive. We face the same reality as feminists: Our fight for and within other movements may prove to be the defining factor in our collective survival.
Today, this same fight and legacy is carried on by organizations such as the Working Families Party, the Communist Party, and labor unions across the country. According to the Pew Research Center, since 2000 Black eligible voters have made up almost half of the growth in the size of the electorate in Georgia. While Dick fell to Jack’s attack, the African American movement has not fallen prey to the blade of the axe of the extreme right. Instead, the African American movement has consistently voted, organized, and remained strong. Progressive forces in this country defeated chattel slavery and Jim Crow. Wendy defeated Jack. We too can defeat the MAGA movement.
Jack as MAGA
If The Shining took place in November of 2024 instead of October of 1980, Wendy might have had more on her mind than simply making sure her son and husband made it through the cold Colorado winter. Like many women this fall, she would have wondered whether she would have the legal right to abortion across all 50 states come springtime. Or if her son Danny would be able to attend a public elementary school, funded and administered by a national Department of Education. Or if her, her friends’ and families’ votes would even matter in future elections. For women of all backgrounds, races, and classes, these are the questions we must consider going into Trump’s second administration.
Once Jack begins his descent into violent paranoia, he strikes up a conversation with an imaginary bartender. Jack retells the story of dislocating Danny’s arm, and in the process makes it clear he still does not take responsibility for hurting Danny. Trump surely must have watched The Shining and taken a page out of Jack’s notebook as he declared from the Oval Office following the Charlottesville riot that he was committed to ending racial hatred and bigotry in the United States. Just as Jack viewed Danny as partially to blame for his own violent drunken rage, Trump would take the press stand following the extreme right’s Charlottesville riot and declare that “both sides” were to blame. In one of the more infamous moments from his presidency, Trump shocked the nation at his assertion that the “alt-left” was just as responsible for the tragic loss of Heather Heyer, despite the fact the man who killed her was strongly affiliated with the neo-Nazi movement.
The connections between the murderous author and Trump don’t stop there. Prior to Jack’s last attempt to take Wendy out once and for all, Jack found himself locked away in the pantry of the hotel, put there by Wendy herself. Trump found himself in a similar position following his 2020 electoral defeat to Joe Biden – temporarily locked away from the public. Jack doesn’t stay put away on the shelves for too long, and his mission was revived by the actions of Delbert Grady, the racist butler who shares Jack’s intentions to end the lives of Wendy, Dick, and Danny. Before Delbert lets Jack out, Jack begs Delbert to “just give [him] one more chance” at taking the life of Wendy. Delbert obliges and Jack begins his march to take Wendy’s life once and for all.
Following his sweeping of the several swing states, racist and white supremacist forces have lifted Trump’s half-alive carcass and given him, too, one more chance. Ta-Nehisi Coates spotted this trend early on and pointed it out in his 2017 essay titled “The First White President.” According to Coates, white supremacy mobilized following Barack Obama’s electoral victory and elected Trump as a way to get revenge against Black America. What drove Trump and his supporters in the 2016 election, as well as the 2020 and 2024 elections, “was a hunger for revanche so strong.”
For both Trump and Jack, their last final push for domination is not about putting the country or Wendy in a better place, but rather a pitiful last attempt to grasp power. The old racist ghost of Delbert Grady let Jack out from his involuntary seclusion, and now the full force of the white supremacist movement is begging to be let back out once again in this country. They are begging for one last chance.
Outro
The election has passed, the smoke has cleared, and after a nail-biting night, Trump took the stage at Mar-a-Lago to greet a majority white crowd of red hats. Despite his victory, the fact remains true that we still have the ability to organize, the ability to win and put forward a people’s agenda. Let’s be honest about the position we find ourselves in at the moment: Jack has swung his axe through the door and left many Americans frightened about what might possibly happen next. Hope is not all gone, however. Wendy survived, and we can too.
In a joint letter addressed to Jill Stein and the U.S. Green Party, a coalition of European Green Parties urged Stein to withdraw from the race, due to the risk of splitting the vote against Trump. “Climate policies require democratic institutions, which we fear would be dismantled if Trump is elected” wrote the coalition in their letter. The partial democracy that exists in the United States is worth fighting for, and we in turn as the people are worth fighting for.
Project 2025, as frightening as it is, is not a reality set in stone. We must always remember that we are not alone; we never have been. In the moments that we find it difficult to maintain dignity, remember how Danny fought for Wendy, and Wendy for Danny. The path to victory is muddy, and Trump sure as hell makes the light on our path all the more dim. But don’t lose hope. Wendy rode out of the hotel in the snowcat, and so too will all of us. We are not going back.
As with all op-eds published by People’s World, this article reflects the views of its author.
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